Flash Fiction: Sludge

We’d been trudging through the treacherous sludge of the Louisiana bayou for nigh on a fortnight, when we came to the clearing. Boudreaux, our guide, stopped us outside the stone circle.

“I do not go into this place,” he said. “It is cursed.”

At the time, I laughed off Boudreaux’s melodramatic warning. I did not laugh when we found the heathen idol on its crimson stained altar, its bulbous outline depicting the hideous features of a membranous winged monstrosity. And as I compile my notes, here in the British Museum’s archives, it begins to glow with a pale, unearthly luminescence.